Adam's IMPORTANT IRISH ART 4 DECEMBER 2024

100 William Ashford was born in Birmingham and chris- tened in St Martin’s parish church on 20 May 1746. At the age of about eighteen, however, he moved to Ireland, taking the position of clerk to the comp- troller of the laboratory section of the Ordnance Office in Dublin Castle, which he held until 1788. Apart from occasional visits to England and Wales, it was in Ireland that Ashford spent his lifetime. He became Dublin’s most successful landscape painter of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centu- ries, succeeding Thomas Roberts who died prema- turely in 1777. In 1767, aged twenty-one, Ashford submitted his first works to the Society of Artists in Ireland, an or- ganisation of artists who had constructed an octag- onal exhibition room for annual displays in William Street, a move which galvanized art production in Ireland. Ashford’s early exhibits were not in the landscape genre for which he is almost exclusively known today. Instead he showed two still-lifes, both titled A Group of Flowers . A work of this title, dated 1766, survives in the National Gallery of Ireland and is likely to be one of these exhibits. Over the following years Ashford exhibited subjects includ- ing dead game, fruit and A Trout from Nature . It was only in 1772 that landscapes, both topographical and demesne, appeared in the exhibitions and hereafter Ashford spent his entire long career painting the Irish landscape in all its manifestations. On Roberts’s death in Lisbon, where he had sought respite for the consumption which afflicted him, Ashford completed his rival’s great set of views of Carton, County Kildare, with two rather different pictures. Clearly in favour with the ducal Fitzger- alds, he won another important early commis- sion for a pair of views of their ancestral home at Maynooth Castle which he exhibited in William Street in 1780. Ashford also contributed to Thomas Milton’s engraved views of Irish seats including portrayals of Belan, County Kildare (1783), Bessbor- ough, County Kilkenny (1785) and Ballyfin, County Laois (1787). In the years after 1780 Ashford’s style broadens somewhat and when a group of his works was offered for sale in 1794, his stylistic progres- sion could be assumed as public knowledge with the advertisement referring to ‘two landscapes in his first style’. Ashford continued to produce exceptional work in the following decades, noticeably the Charleville Forest series of 1801, which illustrates a full un- derstanding of Picturesque theory as it had been codified by William Gilpin (1724-1804) and others in the previous decades. When the Charleville pictures were exhibited in the former Parliament House on College Green in 1801 an anonymous diarist was full of praise: ‘There is here abundant scope for an exertion of the artist’s genius in the delineation of foliage. The articulation is perfect and the colouring so beautifully rich, and various, that I could with pleasure have spent hours in viewing them’. In addition to demesne land- scapes and topographical views, notable among them a magnificent pair showing Dublin Bay look- ing north and south (Adam’s, 1 June 2022), Ashford painted a few landscapes with literary narratives, such as Jacques contemplating the wounded stag, a subject taken from Shakespeare’s As You Like It (private collection). One of his most famous works, selected for the cover of Anne Crookshank and the Knight of Glin’s The Painters of Ireland (1978), shows tourists in search of the antiquarian picturesque exploring the ruins of Cloghoughter Castle, County Cavan. Over the course of his long life, Ashford grew rich and painted less, but increasingly be- came one of the key cultural figures in Dublin in the early decades of the nineteenth. Already in 1801 the anonymous diarist described him as ‘decidedly the first landscape painter’, and it is difficult to cavil at Strickland’s assessment that his ‘pictures justify the reputation he enjoyed as the foremost land- scape painter of his time in Ireland’.